O’Hara was pulled in by her character’s plight in The Studio’s first episode, in which Patty is suddenly and unceremoniously removed from her job at
O’Hara was pulled in by her character’s plight in The Studio’s first episode, in which Patty is suddenly and unceremoniously removed from her job at Continental Studios. She spends a few days licking her wounds. Then, when Matt comes to her begging for lend a hand, she’s able to negotiate a producing deal for herself. “Trying to imagine working that way. Luckily, I haven’t been ripped out of a job like that and then had to think fast. Playing that scene was really fun because it is the devastation of the betrayal and ‘Where do I go from here’ to ‘Okay, this is what I’ll do,’” she says. “So I think there’s also a bright light in this darkness that, ‘Oh, I can actually do what I want to do.’”
Playing Patty made O’Hara sympathetic to the plight of a studio executive, figures who are sometimes viewed by creatives as stiff management that only gets in the way of the inventive process. The show plays on that energetic plenty. But O’Hara also grasped the thanklessness of the job. “The only reason anyone talks to you here is because they want something. I feel for our studio execs, how vulnerable they are day to day,” she says. “That’s a lot of pressure, and they get the blame—and as Matt finds out, they never get the credit.”
She adds that Ron Howard, who appears as himself in the third episode, gave her some added perspective on those fired studio heads. “I asked him, ‘Is it weird to run into these people when you’ve just read that they just got axed?’” she says. “He said, ‘No, no. I always congratulate them because I know they’ve got other dreams.’”
The Studio has a Birdman-like quality to its pacing and technique. Episodes often feature long takes, swift dialogue, and a percussive score that underlines the frantic nature of the moviemaking business. O’Hara describes the production process as intense but fun. They’d often shoot 15 long takes, completing 8 to 10 pages of script at a time. “It’s thrilling—scary, and thrilling—and you really don’t want to be the one to blow a take, especially when somebody else is doing so well. You don’t want to kill the take,” she says.
O’Hara says Rogen and Goldberg were surprisingly laid-back on set despite the pace and the fact that Rogen was both starring in and codirecting the series. “They just have such an easy way about them, even though I know they work unbelievably hard,” she says. “They seem solidly loose the whole way right through. It’s crazy how much they get done, and with such easy, lovely, collaborative temperaments.”
A gigantic storyline as The Studio goes on is Patty’s role as Matt’s mentor. O’Hara found her own first mentors when she started performing with The Second City in her hometown of Toronto in 1974. Among them were her eventual Schitt’s Creek costar Eugene Levy, as well as the tardy Joe Flaherty and Gilda Radner. “I worked with really inspiring people, and I’m still trying to practice what they taught me,” O’Hara says. Radner was particularly inspiring. “I understudied her and just watched her—she was not the type to pontificate or consciously be a mentor, but she just was by example.”
But when I ask if O’Hara takes on that mentorship role now that she’s the veteran on set, she shakes off the idea. “Oh, not if I can help it,” she says. “I think you sit around, and you tell stories, and you’ll learn a lot from stories how to and how not to, and I’d like to think that I learned from everyone of every age.”
At 71, O’Hara has become a comedy legend despite her resistance to that sort of attention. And there’s still much more to come. “It’s funny: When you’re on a set, you’re equals, it’s just an equal playing ground,” she says. “And then, every once in a while, I’ll realize, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m a lot older than everybody. What the heck?’”
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